How To Dispose Of Laptops

Here I will show you how to dispose of laptops. First of all we are going to deal with the hard drive that is inside the laptop. It is important to destroy it properly as the data that is contained within is not so easy to permanently delete. We can do this with a specialized program that I describe here. However, this would take long time and if we have 100 laptops this would take forever.

Here is the quick way to destroy it. We are going to use a hammer and a stone, metal plate or anything that can sustain a hammer’s impact and prevent damage to the flooring.

Here is the hard drive. We need to hit it with a hammer pretty hard over the surface. The actual disk is our target. 20 something hits in my opinion is enough. We should get a piece of metal that has the surface covered with dents. The deeper the dents are, the better.

This way no one will ever recover anything from it.

Laptop memory
does not hold any data when it is not powered on. There is no other
part in the laptop that has data written in it with one exception being
BIOS information, which is stored in one of the microchips on the
motherboard. Usually the BIOS does not contain any personal info; it may
contain just a password for BIOS access and also a password for the
hard drive for security reasons.

You could actually sell laptops
as a whole unit if they still have all the parts intact. I mentioned
above how to destroy hard drives but this is not necessary. In fact,
with commercial software like Blancco or the same Kill Disk
commercial version we can erase a few disks at once. It will still take
some time, but if the laptops still have some value it is a good idea
to sell them.

Sell laptops for parts. This is a
business model that has been working for quite some time now. The idea
is to get laptops for cheap that do not run or in our case we need to
dispose of them, break them in parts and then sell those parts online on
eBay or on a website. However, we would need some business premises for
large quantities and probably have to hire employees to disassemble the
laptops, label parts and put them in boxes for storage. This would be a
time-consuming task, but if you have laptops that still have a high
value like Apple MacBooks then it probably would generate some cash.

If
the battery does not work it can still be sold online. Sometimes people
break the battery apart and use the good cells for DIY projects. Other
times the battery is bought just to find out whether the laptop charging
circuit is working.

Laptop screens are a bit difficult to dispose of. The best method is to keep them intact and sell them with a whole laptop.

There
are two types of laptop screens out there. The first one is the oldest
one, which has CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent lamp) lamps and an
inverter. If you have a screen that is dim or not working at all,
chances are this is the inverter. The inverter is the piece of
bar-shaped circuit board that sits below the screen. It is hard for me
to recommend selling it as a part as the inverter is old and can fail
anytime, and also the screen is old and the lamp inside can fail
anytime.

The second type is an upgrade of the LCD screen. Instead of CCFL lamps
inside it has LEDs (Light-emitting diode). Also, it does not need an
inverter anymore. It is far more reliable than its predecessor and can
also be sold online at a good price, especially when it is from a rare
model. Older LCD screens can also be sold at a good price when they are
from rare models like from 16.1-inch laptops.

If you see that the screen is a bit red or a rose color, this means it is very old and will probably fail in a month or so.

The laptop motherboard can be sold separately if it is still working. Faulty motherboards can also be sold as people are often looking for components from them: microchips, sockets, connectors, capacitors, transistors, etc.

If you have decided to sell the laptop and you need some advice on how to get an operating system on it there is a good guide here. Usually laptops have labels underneath that have software keys printed on it. This way we can install a fresh copy of the operating system and get it activated.

You can also buy cheap software keys from scrap computers on eBay.

Conclusion

We can destroy a hard drive with a hammer really quickly. It takes just 5 seconds to break the disk and the data is destroyed forever. Probably the most economical way is to sell laptops as whole units with erased hard drives and with an operating system. There is a demand for laptop parts especially for Mac laptops, so it would make sense to break apart a large quantity of laptops that do not work and sell them as parts.